February 24, 2013

Int'l Festival for Business * Wealthy People * Needed - Great Mothers

Tomorrow at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Center at 12 noon the International Festival for Business will kick off! The IFB will be a 61 day event in 2014 celebrating British Business. Tomorrow Sir Terry Leahy and other leading business figures will talk about the festival and how you can get involved.

This week also Entrepreneur Country Forum commences on the 27th of February at the Royal Institution of Great Britain - www.entrepreneurcountryforum.com. Mike Lynch will be announcing a UK first - the launch of a $1 billion venture fund, funded heavily by his own money.

And in Barcelona, Global Mobile World Congress will be happening, and much discussion about 4G. So far I've seen plenty little about the economics which will drive this new technology into society, and too much about the tech.

Interesting that Centrica in the Sunday Telegraph today has published an economic impact report showing that it contributes £14.1 billion to the economy - the equivalent to the size of the economy of Manchester.

The Observer had a great profile piece on Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, today anticipating the launch of her Lead In book and movement. I like what she's doing - she's encouraging women to have a plan for their lives, and not just let life happen to them. Although she's been criticised as a super woman and rich, I can't help but think that we'd have more Sheryl Sandberg's if we had more women who thought like her.

The Sunday Times reported that RBS may be about to sell 0ff its shares. One of the best ideas I had seen floated was that they would divy the shares up across the UK population. Now that would be radical - to actually put into the hands of the individual citizen the property of the state. I love it!

And from the Mail on Sunday, an article by Adam Afriyie who is the first person across the political spectrum who is claiming that we should get rid of National Insurance on the very sound basis that it's a tax on jobs, and why would we ever want to do that if we want to grow jobs? This doesn't surprise me from an entrepreneur which Mr Afriyi is, and apparently was a very successful one. Cutting tax dramatically - the Laffer Curve - seems to be completely missing from the debate about how to drive growth in the economy, and yet it has been shown again and again - all the way back to John Kennedy that if you drop the % of tax, you drive up overall tax revenue. There are also always unintended consequences of taxation. Take the £2 million mansion tax that the Lib Dems are trying to push through in their vain attempt to incite jealousy. This actually has the effect of making the property market worse for poor people, but you have to do the analysis of the market and the effect of the tax to see that. The problem is that politicians don't do the analysis, and there is so much jealousy out there.

We have to get comfortable that to create an expanding economy, some people will get rich. You can't create wealth in society without creating wealthy people. And there is nothing wrong with that.

And from the Sunday Times an article on the Masculine Mystique describing how men are ill at ease with themselves due to the rise of strong feminine women these days. It seems that we need great mothers to raise young boys/men to be very comfortable with independent, strong and feminine women - not to feel emasculated by them ...